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The head of a football playing robot. © Nikolas Golsch​​/​​TU Dort­mund
PROFESSOR HANNES MUTSCHLER AWARDED ERC SYNERGY GRANT

How Life Originated from Heated Gas Bubbles

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photo of Prof. Hannes Mutschler © Ralf Maserski
Hannes Mutschler has been Professor for Biomimetic Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology since 2020.
The European Research Council (ERC) is supporting the joint research of Professor Hannes Mutschler from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at TU Dortmund University and Professor Dieter Braun from LMU Munich with around 6 million euros over six years. From around 550 proposals submitted, the “BubbleLife” research project was one of those selected for an ERC Synergy Grant. The project is concerned with the origin of life on Earth: The interdisciplinary teams will study experimentally the conditions under which the key molecules of organic life were able to form and herald the beginning of biological evolution.

The origin of life is one of the greatest mysteries of humankind, and science has no clear answers to it. Within the project “From RNA-peptide coevolution to cellular life at heated air bubbles” (acronym = “BubbleLife”), the interdisciplinary team of chemists, physicists and biochemists wants to seek answers to this fundamental question. Experiments in the past have shown that gas bubbles heated on one side, such as those present in porous volcanic rock, could have played a key role in the early development of life: Water evaporates on their surface and sucks in molecules. These conditions are ideal for chemical, physical and evolutionary processes that eventually lead to cell-like structures.

The two researchers and their working groups now want to combine various hypotheses in this environment and test them experimentally. Here, the team is retracing the path from the formation and evolution of RNA and peptides to the origin of the first “protocells”. For example, self-sustaining replication networks might have formed in this way from individual RNA building blocks. At the same time, amino acids could have polymerized to form more complex peptides, while lipids perhaps formed membrane vesicles and encapsulated these networks. “BubbleLife combines for the first time the coevolution of the key molecules of life as we know it with their encapsulation in a plausible prebiotic environment,” says Hannes Mutschler, Professor for Biomimetic Chemistry at TU Dortmund University. At the end of the work, the aim is to create “protocell generators” on the surface of gas bubbles produced experimentally, which will feed and encapsulate both primitive RNA replicators and peptides as well as modern systems of transcription and translation.

About the ERC Synergy Grant

With its ERC Synergy Grants, the European Research Council supports groups of two to four Principal Investigators who bring together their skills and resources to tackle research questions. In the current call for proposals, the ERC is making 571 million euros available; ten percent of the approx. 550 applications from throughout Europe were selected for funding.

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